ArmedTooHeavily
Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.
User ID: 2895
ArmedTooHeavily
7d ago
I (very much a "gun guy" and an avid motorcycle rider) feel the same way about armed self defence as I feel about motorcycling:
People often get in motorcycle accidents and say "it wasn't my fault!" Maybe technically you're right, and by the laws of the road it wasn't "your fault". Maybe a car failed to yield to you, or ran into you at a stop light, or just merged into you. All clear violations of the law. Congradulations, you're still in the hospital or dead. There are steps that you could have taken to prevent this outcome, and you're paying the price for not taking them. You can be "right" or you can be upright.
There are hundreds of off ramps to almost every violent confrontation, and when it comes to guns, everybody is as vulnerable as a motorcyclist is on the road. Sure, they had no right to block the freeway. Sure, its real fucking sketchy to have one of them come up to your car with a rifle in his hands. Sure, you're probably legally and ethically justified in shooting, so long as you keep the frame of reference constrained to the immediate circumstances. But our ethical lives are not constrained to the immediate circumstances, and Daniel Perry made a series of dumbfuck decisions that led him to the moment his car was being approached by a guy with an AK. I don't think he should be convicted of murder, I would have acquitted, and I also think he is an irresponsible dipshit. His refusal to take the obvious pragmatic precautions like avoiding the protest altogether led to this nightmare, and the retarded culture warrior convictions that led him there were not to his or anyone's benefit.
ArmedTooHeavily
7d ago
Thank you, I can't believe I had to scroll this far to see someone questioning the basic validity of this whole story. I swear to god e-girls are the real mind killer, not politics.
ArmedTooHeavily
14d ago
Do you actually believe that? Your whole post history here seems to me to be basically delusional histrionics, but I can't tell if you're serious or trolling.
Either way, I would be happy to take your money.
Will you take a bet on this? Test your convictions. I will give you great odds. 5 to 1?
ArmedTooHeavily
6d ago
To be clear, I have no sympathy for Foster at all.
ArmedTooHeavily
6d ago
You don't have to do what google maps tells you to, you're still responsible for driving your car. If a road is flooded, or there's an accident, or there's a blockade of armed, screaming people...go around even if your phone doesn't tell you to. Obviously.
ArmedTooHeavily
7d ago
That is an AA-12 fully automatic 12 gauge shotgun, actually.
ArmedTooHeavily
6d ago
My argument is not a moral argument, it is a practical argument. Did you not read that I said I would acquit?
It wasn't worth it. He accomplished nothing of value and severely damaged his own life. He even damaged his tribe by stepping into the villain role that the blues laid out for him, the same way J6 protesters did (Yarvin is completely right about this).
Of course the same argument applies to Foster, any reasonable reading of the facts utterly condemns him.
That doesn't mean Perry was in the right. They were two retards with guns on a collision course and it ended terribly and predictably.
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
This comment from back when we were on the reddit by @SerenaButler (not sure if they're still with us) discusses the idea you're talking about, and is imo very insightful. Original: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ey1zdz/comment/fh6z9pz/
Text: As a somewhat aside, for the longest time as a kid and/or student I never understood why "Access to jobs" was a cause celebré for advocacy campaigners. Jobs are shit and no sane person would ever want one (at least, absent The Man's omnipresent conditioning that you must work for his profit). Money, sure, everyone wants that. Jobs, no. It's like campaigning to be given sickle cell anemia rather than a malaria vaccine: you are asking for a horrible things that coincidentally happens to be upstream of the result you want, rather than asking for the result you want.
The solution to this problem became apparent the first time I'd worked a few jobs: to wit, many jobs are sinecures where you doss about with your work friends, get paid mostly for "presence", and are not actually required to exert your muscles (intellectual or literal) at all. So that's why people want """jobs""". Government's promising to deliver """jobs""" is really a promise to deliver what people actually want, money-for-nothing, with merely the most tissue-thin sop of "labors to be performed" in exchange for these monies to keep up appearences.
To bring this back around to the quoted point: yes, having understood the above logic, campaigners absolutely would have no problem pushing for unqualified people to get jobs, because, outside of a very limited subset of jobs, like, nuclear power plant technician or something, the accomplishment of the task is irrelevant because the task is essentially a fiction. It does not really need to be completed and no-one will suffer if it is not completed so it doesn't matter if the people assigned to it are unqualified. Most jobs (especially public sector ones) are just dolled-up wealth-transfer programmes, and campaigners understand this, and governments understand this, and """generate jobs for the X community""" is a dog-whistle for "free money for X".
EDIT: Through this rubric, lots of (apparently very irresponsible) Blue Tribe campaigns suddenly snap into focus as perfectly reasonable. Women in front line infantry? Well, if you believe that government jobs are all sinecures and tasks to be performed are fictitious and everyone knows this, therefore all these Red Tribers complaining about "upper body strength" or whatever probably are dealing in bad faith misogyny; they just wanna keep the wealth transfer in the hands of /their guys/ burly dudebros rather than letting women sup from the greenback firehouse. Affirmative action Ivy League admissions? Why not, qualifications = credentialism = fake, there's no real tasks to be performed at Harvard or in post-Harvard employment, so therefore all these Red Tribers complaining about "meritocracy" probably are dealing in bad faith racism; they just wanna keep the wealth transfer in the hands of /their guys/ Good Old Boy WASPS rather than letting minorities sup from the credential spigot.
If you really believe in the bullshit jobs thesis, and you really believe that everyone else is in on the open secret too, then when someone makes the "muh objective competence qualifications" against you, it is perfectly reasonable to believe it's an argument that could only ever be made in bad faith.
ArmedTooHeavily
13d ago
Yes, please.
ArmedTooHeavily
7d ago
Just in case you didnt know, the tv show "the pacific" is vased chiefly on that book and is very, very good.
A quick aside: Oregon is a sea of under-populated red surrounding a couple of blue cities, mainly Portland. The Portland metro area has about half the population of the whole state, and therefore Portland mostly controls state-level politics. Where goes Portland, so goes Oregon. So my analysis is mainly focusing on Portland, because that's both where the problem mainly is and where the political will driving all of this originates from.
So: In my opinion, many far-left beliefs are luxury beliefs adopted for their value as status signals. The practical considerations tend to be secondary to the value as a social signal and the costs of these beliefs aren't paid by the people espousing them. People who want to abolish the police aren't typically at risk of being robbed, people who want to subsidize homelessness don't usually live near the homeless, people who want to ban all guns don't usually need to physically protect themselves from violence, people who want to legalize drugs don't interact with drug addicts.
The current state of Portland makes the costs of these luxury beliefs ubiquitous and impossible to ignore. Several events have compounded each other to produce this situation:
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Portland has incredibly lax policies around street homelessness that approach subsidization. This started with then-mayor Charlie Hale's "Housing State Of Emergency" in 2015 which forbid sweeping homeless camps and has gotten worse ever since. Homeless camps filled with people literally driven insane by drugs are ubiquitous. Local governments have gone as far as distributing tents (22,000 in two years!) and even foil and straws for smoking fentanyl to the homeless.
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Following the nine-month anti-police protest/riot/siege at the Portland Justice Center in 2020, the city has massively de-policed. This is a combination of the police deliberately reducing enforcement as a "silent strike", the cops being massively under-manned, and city policies that prevent police work. We are talking multiple-hour response times for everything except life-threatening violent crimes actively being committed. Someone I know personally caught a guy trying to steal the catalytic converter off of his car then followed the perp in a car chase with 911 on the phone for an hour and a half until he lost him. The cops never showed, they contacted him by phone the next day to take a report.
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We legalized drugs completely, as you noted.
These factors have combined to make the drug/homelessness problem so bad at this point that it is seriously negatively affecting everyone in the city. Every person I know who lives in Portland has, in the last couple of years, has been victimized by crime and had multiple negative interactions with the drug addicted homeless. Business are closing and the downtown core of Portland is dying, office workers are refusing to return from work-from-home because of how unsafe it is, and Portland is losing population for the first time in living memory as people flee the dysfunction. The luxury beliefs are finally extracting their costs from the belief-holders, and that's why the tide has turned on this specific issue. However, I don't think you can extrapolate this shift to any greater shift in progressive sentiments. I've had a lot of conversations with people about this: almost universally being a "good progressive" is still very much a core part of the identity of most Portlanders and they are only very begrudgingly ceding ground on drug legalization specifically. They absolutely do not draw any conclusions from this about any of their other beliefs; this threat to their identity is compartmentalized away.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
Tbh it's a pretty vile thing to say, trivializing the unbelievable amounts of human suffering that are occurring.
ArmedTooHeavily
6d ago
"Don't drive into a crowd of screaming people."
"How unreasonable! You can't expect me to be an expert at everything!"
ArmedTooHeavily
6d ago
Yes, my argument is exactly that: Perry should have been smarter and he had plenty of opportunity to avoid what happened.
ArmedTooHeavily
6d ago
Are you kidding?
ArmedTooHeavily
6d ago
It was not his job to drive through a road blockade.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
Ridiculously bad take. Genetics certainly set a cap on maximum achievable IQ, but the idea that environmental factors cannot suppress IQ is self evidently ridiculous. Do you seriously think childhood nutrition (as an obvious example) plays no part in brain development? "There's no environmental influence on IQ" is as stupid as "there's no genetic influence on IQ."
I say this as someone genuinely sympathetic to your position in this argument: You are conspicuously and repeatedly dodging /u/somedude's obvious point. If you aren't intending to dodge it, then you should go back and re-read the exchanges in that second link with fresh eyes; the point the people responding to you are making is clearly stated and straightforward and you have missed it. If on the other hand you are intentionally dodging, know that it is incredibly obvious and the virtuous thing to do in this circumstance would be to straightforwardly admit that they are making a good point or actually respond to the substance.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
There are some timeless pieces of wisdom passed down from generation to generation that unfortunately the majority of people are doomed to re-learn for themselves in incredibly painful ways.
This time, it's "Don't stick your dick in crazy."
Best of luck.
ArmedTooHeavily
15d ago
I think that technocapital has already selected for "inhuman" traits in some populations (though I do think calling it "inhuman" is maybe not the most descriptive, because traits that humans have are definitionally human traits). These traits are the ones that make people more effective as components in the civilizational machine, the populations are the more heavily historically "civilized" ones, and there is a lot of crossover with the cultural traits identified as the "aspects and assumptions of whiteness and white culture" in the infamous smithsonian infographic (https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational-thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333#slideshow/1610610).
Individuality, neuroticism, self-reliance, "protestant" work ethic, respect for rules, avoidance of overt conflict, objective/linear thinking, etc are all traits that are unusual in pre-civilizational humans and that make for better members of civilization, and I think that technocapital has selected for those traits in humans both biologically and memetically/culturally.
All of this to say, it's not "What if it changes human nature?", that ship has sailed. The question is "What's anyone doing to take technocapital out of the driver's seat?", and the answer is "pretty much nothing, Kaczynski and Land are right, we are not our own masters, and it's acceleration from here on out."
ArmedTooHeavily
2mo ago
Living in a deep blue enclave and being contrarian to my bones, it can be easy for me to start to think of the reds as "my team." Stories like this are an important reminder that they are absolutely not, and that as a rule anyone who makes it to power has abandoned most of the principles I care about.
Very disappointed in this. I fear that the version of freedom of speech that I believe in was the result of fleeting, temporary historical circumstances that will not be repeated, and certainly not while I live.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
The woke are more correct than the mainstream in asserting that the sum of micro-aggressions is outright aggression- it's just that the only people who really care to micro-aggress are the woke
Ah yes, only your outgroup performs a basic-but-ubiquitous behavior like minor acts of aggression.
The police exist as the enforcement arm of the state in order to hold up the state's half of the bargain in their monopoly on force.
We are making a deal with the state. We give up some things, most notably the right to use violence to enforce our will and of course our money in the form of taxes. In return the state acts as the "unincentivized incentivizer" to solve Molochian coordination problems and arbitrate disputes up to and including using force on our behalf to bring those disputes to a satisfactory close. The police are part of the terms of the contract, so to speak.
It is not a violation of one's autonomy to enter into a contract. Right wingers acknowledge that the state and its monopoly on violence is helpful and necessary (necessary in order to avoid the state of nature, the Hobbesian "war of all against all"), they aren't anarchists.
I think that difference in internal/external locus of control between the Left and Right is better thought of as a side effect of the difference between right and left wing thought, not the source of it. The primary philosophical disagreement from which all others flow is the Hobbes/Rousseau split, which is basically how you would answer, "if we stopped controlling everything and completely took our hands off the wheel, would things be good or bad?" or, "are people inherently good and learn to become evil, or inherently evil and learn to become good?" I think there are a fairly strong selection effects in that people with high personal agency tend to gravitate towards right wing politics, but it's not the cause.
ArmedTooHeavily
1mo ago
"This is the nature of all computer based businesses in a competency crisis and DEI hellworld"
...or just have a couple of your friends proofread before publishing?
Ffs people, don't feed the trolls.
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